@article{Government:1811,
      recid = {1811},
      author = {Leung, Justin Hilyin},
      title = {The Impact of Government Policies on Retail Prices and  Welfare},
      publisher = {The University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2019-06},
      pages = {199},
      abstract = {This dissertation is composed of two chapters studying the  impact of government policies on retail prices and welfare.  The first chapter estimates the impact of the minimum wage  on retail prices using store-level scanner data. I provide  empirical evidence that a 10% increase in the minimum wage  raises grocery store prices by 0.6%-0.8%, and suggest that  the minimum wage not only raises labor costs but also  affects product demand, especially in poorer regions. This  points to novel channels of heterogeneity in pass-through  that have distributional consequences, with key  implications for real wage inequality. The second chapter  estimates the impact of the Supplemental Nutrition  Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the Food Stamp Program)  on retail prices, sales, and household consumption. We  develop a theoretical partial equilibrium framework to  calculate the local incidence of SNAP benefits for  SNAP-eligible products, using our reduced-form estimates as  sufficient statistics. We find that producers mostly  benefit at the expense of non-SNAP households due to market  power. A marginal dollar of SNAP benefits increases  producer surplus by about $0.5, increases SNAP consumer  surplus by about $0.7, and decreases non-SNAP consumer  surplus by about $0.4. If the objective of SNAP is to  guarantee a floor of real spending power on food, federal  maximum benefits should be increased by about 10% to  account for the price response.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1811},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1811},
}